Samsung exec claims Galaxy S III will have quad-core Exynos processor

More Galaxy S III rumors - today must end with a "y", then. In its latest batch of corporate teasing, Samsung has found a surreptitious way to whet our appetites for the new flagship phone long before they even announce when they're announcing it. The Korea Times quotes an unnamed Samsung executive, who said that the company is looking to lower its dependence on silicon giant Qualcomm and go with an in-house solution. That will come in the the form of a quad-core Exynos system-on-a-chip, though the exact model, speed and capability are all up in the air at the moment. That's all you get; check back in another week for a tiny nugget of new information.

It's no secret that Samsung does an outstanding amount of business with US-based chipmaker Qualcomm: the vast majority of their smartphones and a few tablets to boot use varrying tiers of Qualcomm's Snapdragon architecture. Samsung's own efforts in that area have been relatively low-scale at this point, but those products that do use the current generation of chips (like the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus) tend to stomp on comparable models. If Samsung can ramp up production to meet the inevitably high demand for the Galaxy S III, they'll probably have a legitimate competitor to both the Tegra 3 and Snapdragon S4 Krait platforms. The Exynos 4412 chip, with four cores running at a maximim of 1.5Ghz, seems the most likely candidate.

The executive didn't have any more hardware details on the GSIII to spill, sadly leaving us almost as unenlightened as we were previously. No less than three different "leaks" of the new superphone sprang up last week, and since none of them match any of the others, two or (more likely) all three are more faked versions of the real hardware. Samsung has already stated that they'll be holding an event just for the Galaxy S II successor sometime before the end of Q2, but other than that and this unconfirmed Exynos report, there's very little confirmed information oat all.